Max Fisher, MA Biography

Not Clearly Pro or Con to the question "Is a Two-State Solution (Israel and Palestine) an Acceptable Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?"

Reasoning:

"There are, broadly speaking, two possible answers on the table for what Israel should do about its conflict with the Palestinians. One, pushed by the international community, is to strike a peace deal that would withdraw Israel from the occupied territories and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. The other, pushed by an Israeli far right that is a political minority but to which Netanyahu is electorally beholden, is to maintain permanent control of the territory or even annex it outright...

If withdrawing from the West Bank is politically and operationally difficult now, it will only get harder; and if the settlements in the West Bank are making a Palestinian state less viable now, Palestinian independence will only become less possible.

The deepening entanglement of Israel and Palestine — in which Israel either sacrifices its democracy and its international standing to keep Palestinians disenfranchised or allows Palestinians equal rights, thus preserving Israeli democracy at the cost of its Jewish identity — becomes more likely, and harder to avert, each day that passes...

The most extreme outcome is that Israel would declare one day that it was absorbing the West Bank as Israeli territory...

Perhaps a more likely endpoint of permanent, ever-deepening occupation is that Israel will come to resemble, far more than its critics say it already does, a 19th-century-style colonial power ruling over the Palestinians."